Quantum Consciousness?

At the leading edge of scientific thought today, science, religion and philosophy are proving to be simply different modes of inquiry into the same fundamental questions. Twenty-first Century science is beginning to converge on many of the same insights as Axial thinkers in the Chinese, Indian, Greek, Judaic and Christian philosophical and religious traditions.

The great quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, remarking on an observation made by his colleague Wolfgang Pauli once said:

“… Pauli once spoke of two limiting conceptions, both of which have been extraordinarily fruitful in the history of human thought, although no genuine reality corresponds to them. At one extreme is the idea of an objective world, pursuing its regular course in space and time, independently of any kind of observing subject; this has been the guiding image of modern science. At the other extreme is the idea of a subject, mystically experiencing the unity of the world and no longer confronted by an object or by any objective world; this has been the guiding image of Asian mysticism. Our thinking moves somewhere in the middle, between these two limiting conceptions; we should maintain the tension resulting from these two opposites. “

The great discovery of quantum physics was that, at the level of the smallest indivisible units of space and time, all possible outcomes of identical conditions co-exist with relative probabilities best mathematically expressed as a wave function. At the level of fundamental units energy and matter are not differentiated: matter is created when the wave function collapses into a single outcome, and that outcome is a particle with identifiable co-ordinates in space and time. More controversially, the main school of quantum physics led by Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Pauli and Bohr (called the Copenhagen interpretation) postulates that what causes the wave function to collapse into a single outcome is simply the observation of that outcome itself. All the other possibilities in the wave function exist and a different observation will cause the wave function to collapse into a different outcome. Most interestingly, the observation need not be “local”, which is to say that the collapse of a wave function does not depend on an information exchange between the observer and the observed outcome: an observation in one location can, and does cause a simultaneous collapses in other locations and at other times. These quantum entanglements explain why in real physics labs particles are sometimes observed to pop out of nowhere…to appear out of nothing, or to appear or disappear in strange correlations with non-local events. Not all physicists have accepted this view: indeed, Einstein himself preferred the view that there must be further unseen, unknown and as yet undiscovered local or non-local variables which when discovered would make the outcome of any set of conditions wholly deterministic.

As science goes, neither of these explanations is particularly elegant as neither is, for the time being at least, falsifiable by experiment. But let’s stay with the main school, the Copenhagen interpretation. The most vexing question raised by the interpretation is this: who or what is the observer? Here the lines begin to blur into philosophical and religious thought, because the very notion of an observation begs a distinction between the object that is observed and some conscious subject capable of making the observation. This in turn leads straight to questions as to the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the nature of “reality”, which needless to say has been a much travelled subject in all religious and philosophical traditions.

A good friend loaned me a video by Dr. Amit Goswami to watch over this Easter week-end. Goswami is a professor of quantum physics turned something of a new age guru as a result of his claim that there must exist something called a quantum consciousness which acts non-locally to create reality as we observe it.

He starts with the question: “who chooses”? If all possibilities co-exist (which they must, if they exist at the quantum level, because the material world is simply a hierarchy of complexity built up in space and time from fundamental particles to atoms to elements to molecules to molecular structures to observed matter) what observation collapses the wave functions at the quantum level and thus chooses reality as we observe it?

Although I am happy to make the assumption that human beings are conscious, at least in some measure, I’m afraid it clearly cannot be we who do the choosing (or at least not all the choosing). If reality depended on conscious human choice there would have been nothing but possibilities, that is to say no material objects, until we evolved a sufficient level of consciousness to recognize possibilities and make choices, i.e. some time in the last 3 Million years, which is how long our species has existed. Since we are surrounded by things that we can prove existed 4.5 Billion years ago at least, and we are reasonably confident the universe we find ourselves in has been in existence for at least 13 Billion years, we can be reasonably confident that most quantum events do not depend on our consciousness! More immediately, it is clearly not generally possible for us to bring possibilities into existence by choosing them: if we could we would all chose not to allow things that hurt us or kill us, or indeed things that simply displease us to come into our path. Each of us would live in our own bespoke pleasure palace, so to speak, which sounds attractive until you consider that we would also have a serious problem. The pleasure palace would be infinitely lonely, in that if you chose a certain reality and that reality was different from mine we would not be able to communicate about the reality around us. Whatever you tried to communicate would be incomprehensible gibberish to me and vice-versa. Without a shared experience of at least some level of reality, each of us would live in a terrible isolation, and there would be no possibility of communicating information or social interaction between us.

So who does make the choice then, if we don’t?

Goswami proposes what he calls “Quantum Consciousness”: a non-local consciousness that encompasses all possibilities at all places and at all times and chooses from among them bringing about local realities, such as ourselves and the reality we experience around us. Quantum Consciousness is thus something like the Mind of God. It is also very much like Plato’s ideal forms, Brahman in the Vedic religions, or the Dao in Chinese mystic tradition. If he stopped there his idea would be interesting, but not particularly satisfying as it offers neither an explanation of nor a role for our own undeniable evolution of consciousness, however local, limited, and of recent and short duration it may be! It is as Richard Dawkins once so acerbically observed a “God of the Gaps” hypothesis: the sort of “God” that is postulated without convincing evidence simply to fill in an otherwise unanswerable question, in this case “Who Chooses?”

But Goswami does not stop. He further proposes something which is more intriguing: that since living things are necessarily part of the reality that a quantum consciousness brings into existence, and living things have evolved consciousness, then perhaps it is the case that living things, and in particular human beings, are becoming part or beginning to share some aspects of quantum consciousness, and are thus acquiring the potential to affect reality through quantum choice. This suggests that we are evolving is towards a greater participation in quantum consciousness. As a result, he believes that as we evolve we will naturally bias quantum consciousness towards choices that are “good”, which is to say more favorable to living things. Although all possibilities exist in quantum consciousness, the evolution of living things to a level of consciousness that enables them to better apprehend and affect quantum choices will eventually alter reality in ways that favor the possibilities that are “good” outcomes for living things. Although the possibility of evil will always remain, because outcomes that are evil for living things are by definition included in the sum of all possibilities, he cites Mother Theresa, Gandhi and Martin Luther King as recent examples of evolved consciousnesses that have already by the power of their thought and example, made human poverty or the resolution of conflict through violence unacceptable, and therefore less probable outcomes in our reality. Goswami suggests that our participation in quantum consciousness increases our access to spontaneous thoughts, insights and intuitions that point the way to better outcomes for humanity. For example, consciousness of the fundamental unity of all living things leads to insight as to their inter-dependency and creates a desire to preserve and protect our environment. He describes humanity’s evolving consciousness as developing awareness of our “subtle body”, meaning the places in but distinct from our physical bodies where we interact with quantum consciousness, evoking clear associations with the soul in Christian thought, the Qi in the Chinese mystical tradition, and the Atman in Vedic tradition.

Yikes! What started out as a purported scientific insight seems to have moved a long way from the ground of science! Is there is any support at all in what we know of evolutionary biology for the idea that our own consciousness is evolving? The correct answer may be what the bleep do we know anyway, but I shall persevere nevertheless and see where this line of thought may take us.

All living beings are, of course, material. Humans are made up of trillions of cells that are made up of more trillions of molecules (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and other organic and inorganic molecules) that can themselves be broken down into chemical elements (around 65% Oxygen, 18% Carbon, 10% Hydrogen, 3% Nitrogen, 2% Calcium, 1.1% Phosphorus and the remainder including Potassium, Sulphur, Sodium, Chlorine, Magnesium, Iron, Manganese, Copper, Iodine Cobalt and Zinc). Of course the elements themselves are atoms built up from fundamental particles, which is how you get back to the conclusion that whatever we are we are the result of choices between possibilities at the quantum levels of time and space. Ultimately, quantum choice dictates what we are, where we are in time and space, and, of course everything that we will observe as the reality that surrounds us in the same time and space co-ordinates.

But we are obviously more than just the sum of our material parts: we are the result of the all of the singular outcomes of all the possibilities since time and space in our universe began. The precise conditions that have enabled and, indeed, that enable our existence for every moment of our lifetime are unique and highly improbable. They include, of course, the necessary antecedents in the material world: the formation of stars, nuclear fusion reactions in them, the relationships between force fields and generally the constants of nature as we understand them. But they also include the evolution of living things, which is where I think Goswami’s argument becomes interesting.

Living things share two characteristics not shared by any other organization of material things: the ability to replicate inter-generationally and evolution through the accumulation of small changes over multiple generations by a process of non-random selection amongst randomly generated choices.

Replication is a unique characteristic of living things that results from the intergenerational transmission of genes. Genes contain information encoded in DNA molecules. Genetic information is a data base of local rules which, in differing chemical environments, will cause enzymes to form that will ensure that molecules with unique characteristics…proteins, lipids and carbohydrates will assemble which will ultimately define unique cellular structures, such as heart cells, or liver cells, or fingernails, the sum total of which will be expressed in a living animal. The reason cells differentiate, and bodies are built to be as they are, is that the local rules cause the cells to divide constantly and asymmetrically. Asymmetric cell division ensures that the precise chemical composition of daughter cells will differ in small but important degrees from their predecessors. Different chemical environments in the cell elicit rules based responses from different DNA molecules in genes in the cell, thus causing changes in cell chemistry. This in turn leads to formation of different proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and so forth specific to the cell type involved. The large variety of cells so produced in turn combine to form the various tissues, nerves, organs and brains that make up a living thing. All this happens well above the quantum level and, interestingly, does not appear to involve any kind of choice: given the presence of the required elements in appropriate quantities, and of the appropriate external conditions (temperature, magnetic and other energy fields…) the same genes will produce identical molecular combinations and, eventually, identical living things forever.

But living things are all, without exception, different from each other, albeit in sometimes subtle and imperceptible ways. How can this be if genes merely transmit sets of local rules that will by definition produce the same chemical result given the same conditions? This is of course where evolution comes in. Every one of the trillion odd cells in your body has the specific full genetic data base transmitted from your ancestors, which, amazingly, includes the common ancestors of all living things that have ever existed. The reason the end results are so different (you, me, the flea in my dog’s fur and the rosebush in my garden) despite ultimately common ancestry is that the data base we each inherit depends entirely on the line of ancestry through which it has been transmitted to us. Most (but not all) of the transmission occurs sexually, ensuring constantly recombining iterations of all possible gene combinations in the gene pools being transmitted to each offspring from the paternal and maternal lines. In addition, from time to time a random event will intervene: an unusual energy or radiation burst or a change in the surrounding chemical environment will cause a mutation in a gene i.e. a change to the DNA encoded data base in the gene that will result in a change in the living things that will result from it.

For most of the history of life on earth the development of the gene pool, and with it of all existing and past species of living organisms, has been determined by one, simple, non-random rule: survival, or more precisely relative success in reproduction. Adaptations that lead to more favorable reproductive odds, whether as a result of sexual re-combination or naturally occurring mutations are retained in the gene pool as it is transmitted from generation to generation. Unsuccessful adaptations eventually disappear from the pool as a result of reproductive failure, i.e. because they are eventually no longer transmitted from generation to generation. This simple law, operating since the inception of life some 3.5 Billion years ago, has resulted in the almost all the diversity in living organisms we find around us today and has, of course, also resulted in us.

I used the word almost for a reason. Since the first time, a few hundred thousand years ago, that humans began to domesticate plants and animals, a new “evolutionary” law has been gaining in importance: what is retained in the gene pool of other species is to an ever increasing extent what we chose. In the earliest stages, human choice involved selective breeding: flowers in colors we enjoy and grains nutritious to us were bred at the expense of other plant species from lands “cleared” for agriculture. Animals whose meat or milk could nourish us were bred selectively, favoring adaptations that produced more of what we wanted from them. The tamest wolves were domesticated and bred selectively to produce war dogs, vermin catchers and, eventually, competitors at Crufts and affectionate companions. In the last 4000 years or so, with the advent of what we call “civilization”, human choice as a non-random evolutionary selection rule has increased dramatically in importance. Humanity, as a result, has thrived…and multiplied. There were probably around 200 Million humans alive at the time of the Roman Empire. It took over 1000 years for the number to double to 400 Million, around 1500 AD. By 1825, global population reached 1 Billion. In 1925, it reached 2 Billion. When I was born, in 1951, it was around 2 and ½ Billion. Today, it is just over 6 and ¾ Billion and on current trends will reach 9 Billion in the next 30 years. Our impact is twofold: first, as a result of the cumulative impact we have on our environment, “natural” selection is being overtaken by “unconscious human selection”. By this I mean the cumulative effect we have on the living environment around us simply by existing. This includes the increased prevalence and variety of toxins and pollutants which both destroy habitats for other living species and increase the number of random mutations entering the gene pool of all species, as well as the increased prevalence and accelerated evolution of bacteria and viruses that thrive in humans and domesticated animals. It also includes the destruction of habitats and the inevitable introduction of invasive species as human settlement continuously expands to meet the needs of an exploding population. The second way in which we make evolutionary choices is what I call “Conscious human selection”, which includes domestication and selective breeding of plant and animal species. With the advent of our understanding of genetics and molecular biology, conscious human selection has also begun to accelerate dramatically. Fields that were once the habitat of multitudes of plant species selected for their ability to succeed in the various ecological niches nature offered them have been replaced by vast uniform plantations of genetically engineered soybeans, corn and wheat grasses. Molecular biology, genetic science and modern medicine have enabled us to mitigate the consequences of evolution on our own development by encouraging the “survival of all”, including the fattest and the fittest! So in the case of living things, at least, I believe we have reached the point where “unconscious” and “conscious” human selection combined are of measurable importance in determining the future of life on this planet than “natural” selection. Having said that, as it would only take one particularly virulent new virus or aggressive new strain of drug resistant bacterium to “de-select” us. So it would be premature and arrogant in the extreme to conclude that human selection has taken over from natural selection as the dominant driver of evolution…

Nevertheless, in the biological sense, human consciousness is choosing, and to an increasing extent consciously choosing a significant part of the reality that surrounds us. Are we having a similar effect on the non-living material world? Yes, of course we are. We have taken all of the earth’s material as available to be converted into things we need (like shelter), or simply want (like I-Pods, Phones and Pads and plastic bottles to transport potable water half way around the world). This is why, as population grows, we increasingly facing “shortages” of everything from rare earths to metals to hydrocarbons to fresh water. There is no question that the material reality that surrounds us is deeply affected by conscious human choice.

Our ability to make choices is increasing at an accelerating rate. Computing power has already led to what Ray Kurtzweil calls an “accelerating rate of change” in almost every aspect of human endeavor. From the decoding of the genome of all living species to the investigation of particle physics in the large hadron collider at CERN in Switzerland to the probe of the origins of the cosmos by the upper atmospheric SOFIA deep space observatory our knowledge and technological abilities are expanding at a dizzying pace. The raw computing power of machines will at some time in the next few years exceed that of a human brain. In our lifetime, the computational power of machines may well exceed that of all the human brains on this planet combined. Harnessing that computing power to our purposes necessarily implies that we will continue to have an accelerating ability to transform our reality in ways too myriad even to be imagined today. That is of course provided the machines do not, as in popular science fiction, rebel and “de-select” us in much the same way as we “de-select” unwanted viruses and bacteria…

So human choice is certainly “choosing” and ever increasing part of the reality that surrounds us. Does that mean we are affecting choice the quantum level? I doubt it. We are re-arranging the furniture in countless ways, but we are not altering the sum of the materials from which it is made. Put another way, we are not changing the quantum components of our reality, simply their arrangement into both living and non-living things. And at that we are doing so only in an infinitesimally small and remote corner of our universe. Our effect beyond this planet so far is very limited. Bits of space debris here and there on the Moon, Mars, Venus, or just drifting out into space. An increasing cacophony of radio and other electromagnetic noise spreading to nearby galaxies (we haven’t been producing radio and electromagnetic signals long enough for them to get very far, even travelling at the speed of light!) and the systematic signaling and probing of the SETI project, which as yet has reached an infinitesimal fraction of the visible universe. In the game of choosing reality, we are still a very, very small influence.

But how about the evolution of our consciousness? Does our accelerating ability to manipulate our immediate, earthly reality increase our intuition or insight? Are we developing a greater connection to “quantum consciousness”, to use Goswami’s term for consciousness that chooses, and therefore determines all reality at the quantum level? And if so does that mean that we can affect quantum choice for good? My answer is, perhaps. There is some evidence, for example, that the increased networking capacity resulting from advances in our communications technology empowers collective choice that can be focused for good, as in the case of the global movement to mitigate the risk of catastrophic climate change. There has been some decrease in the scale of destructive human conflict, including mitigation of the threat of global nuclear, chemical or biological war. There has been modest progress towards the millennium objectives of eradicating poverty, hunger and disease. But if there is a comprehensive subjective realm of pure consciousness beyond all objects and materiality, and if we are opening our “subtle bodies” towards a deeper connection with it, our progress is painfully slow. Meanwhile, spiritual life for most of humanity remains shackled by the antiquated power structures of organized religions, and blighted by chronic abuse of the credulity of the faithful by their often greedy and power hungry hierarchies.

All in all, I conclude that Goswami’s “quantum consciousness” is a thought worth further thought. However, it is still far from providing a conclusive explanation of reality as we perceive it or of our place within it. But then again, as Pauli observed, sages and mystics in all of the world’s great spiritual traditions have pointed us towards realms of unity not limited by any objective reality nor indeed by any individual subject. Perhaps science is simply drawing us towards the same vision…

G.K.T. Philalethes

The thing that happens

The thing that happens is that you become trapped in who you are.

Say you are blessed with a wonderful talent, like playing the violin. If you are fortunate, you will pour all your passion, all your soul, all that you are into the music that you play. Seized by the overwhelmingly powerful moments in your life, you may compose sounds that move millions of souls. You may harmonize your music to another's, to the one that becomes your one. This is life's greatest epiphany. Playing together, you become a new "one", born of such an intense energy as has never before channeled itself in music. You and your beloved literally become stars.

But then you are trapped. You will play your instrument until no one cares to listen any more. At best, you may record the sadness of producing an ever diminishing catalog of new music. And then you will simply fade from view.

This is our story: the story of us all. However great or small our moments of triumph and ecstasy, however unbounded our aspirations may once seem, we are doomed to repeat ourselves until we are no longer interesting, and to fade into oblivion singing the same song, telling the same story, painting the same painting, or playing the same role until there is no audience left, and we are alone.

That is why in order to find true happiness, we must look elsewhere than to our achievements...

G.K.T. Philalethes
30 January 2010